Review - H

H-France Review
Volume 9 (2009)
Page 202
H-France Review Vol. 9 (April 2009), No. 52
Christian Chevandier and Jean-Claude Daumas, eds., Travailler dans les entreprises sous l’Occupation.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2007. 523pp. €15.00 (pb). ISBN 978-2-84867-211-3.
Reviewed by Kenneth Mouré, University of California at Santa Barbara.
The enduring fascination with the French experience during the German Occupation has left French
workers at the margins of most historical narratives. If not for the STO--the compulsory labor service
instituted in February 1943 that, with the Rélève begun in June 1942, sent 650,000 French workers to
Germany and prompted young men facing labor conscription to opt instead for the maquis--workers
might pass virtually unnoticed in many surveys of the Vichy years.[1] Yet paid employment dominates
the daily lives, the location and the well-being of most adults, and in the circumstances of economic
shortages and politicization of daily life in Occupied France, it deserves greater attention. Single-author
books on labor during the Occupation are few, with works like Jean-Pierre Le Crom’s Syndicats, nous
voilà! yielding results as rewarding as they are rare.[2] Much of the new work has appeared in
conference volumes,[3] most notably in two volumes published in 1992 and 2003.[4] Travailler dans
les entreprises sous l’Occupation joins a new conference volume on unionized workers [5] as the latest
contributions presenting the results of new research. It combines thirty papers from two conferences
run in June and October 2006 by the CNRS research group on “Les entreprises françaises sous
l’Occupation.” [6]
The basic context for work experience is well established. Rearmament in the late 1930s increased
industrial employment. Mobilization in 1939 and defeat in 1940 produced sharp convulsions in
employment, with substantial employee turnover and then high unemployment as the chaos of exodus
and defeat brought severe economic dislocation. Workers had been mobilized, and then as prisoners
were unable to return to their homes and employment. The battle for France destroyed transport
infrastructure and some productive capacity. The Germans seized raw materials, finished goods, fuel,
vehicles, rolling stock and food supplies. The division of the country into zones with restricted access
aggravated transport difficulties. German authorities showed no haste in trying to restore production,
as the seizure of booty, for immediate consumption or for use in the war against Britain, initially took
priority.
This produced a hiatus in production and substantial unemployment in 1940-41. Recovery took place in
reorienting French production to meet German needs from limited supplies of raw materials. This
amounted to a vassalization of the French economy, under a new regime of state controls working in
German interest but implemented by French authorities. It included a serious effort to freeze wages
and prices. Wages are easier to control than prices: real wages fell, food supply declined, and transport
difficulties increased. Working for German firms, whether in France or in Germany, whether voluntary
or conscripted, offered better wages and benefits. The Organization Todt in France offered high
salaries and a combination of bonuses, perks and premiums that drew large numbers of French workers.
The Vichy regime wished to make work the foundation of its program for national renewal (Dalisson).
Female employment was to be reduced in favor of concentrating women’s responsibilities in the home
and family. But growing labor shortages and the desperate need for increased income to buy food
required that women, especially mothers, return to work.
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Volume 9 (2009)
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Travailler dans les entreprises offers case studies at three levels: individual firms, regions, and categories
of enterprise or worker. The nature of available archival evidence makes it difficult to avoid a
concentration on the role of the state (particularly in dealing with the STO, wage controls, and efforts
to ameliorate working conditions) and the management level of decision-making in individual firms.
The collection has particularly interesting contributions on the impact of STO and employers’ efforts to
protect their workers; on the degree to which French firms assisted in the vassalization of the French
economy and contributed to German war production; and on the experience of work during the
Occupation (productivity, the role of comités sociaux, and women in workforce).
The STO (decreed on 16 February 1943) marked a seismic shift in the balance of
accommodation/resistance.[7] The threat of being sent to Germany for compulsory labor service for
men born between 1920 and 1922 created an immediate sense of crisis. The program had initial success,
over-fulfilling an initial quota of 250,000 men, but results then fell precipitously. Raphaël Spina
provides a concise overview of the impact of STO on French firms, taking into account the variation in
patron response (from resistance to cooperation), workers’ reactions, means of evasion, and the effects
on productivity through the employment of extra and untrained workers and the increased manpower
shortage. Other contributions assess the impact on workers in Lorraine, Haute-Savoie and the
Bourgogne, and on the Société Schneider and the SNCF. Particularly notable are the consequences in
increased accidents at work and declining productivity and worker morale. The result was to weaken
production in France, alienate workers from the Vichy regime, and increase the workplace need for
women, whom Vichy declared it wished to keep in traditional roles of housekeeping and childrearing.
French workers in Germany were treated as forced labor rather than “ambassadors of French quality,”
hardly a strong recommendation for work in Germany, voluntary or conscript. When Schneider sent
“missions” to German factories it found its workers living in barracks, short of food and clothing, and
working sixty-hour weeks (Berger, p. 76). Managers in France developed strategies to keep their
workers at home, transferring workers to protected sectors and arguing they could not meet German
orders on time without keeping qualified workers in France. In the automobile sector, Peugeot
employed workers in repainting offices, planting trees and redecorating factory canteens; Citroën kept
workers employed making marmites norvégiennes, broad-brimmed hats, shoes, and even swaddling
clothes (Loubet, p. 182). Although French workers were promised better wages in Germany, they were
paid less than their German counterparts, and their most frequent complaint was that they were not
paid the wages promised (Arnaud, p. 329). When paid, there was little for them to buy. In 1945,
workers had their Reichsmark savings confiscated when they returned to France, a source of lasting
bitterness (Arnaud, pp. 335-8).
Working for the Germans in France offered better prospects: German firms promised higher wages,
greater employment security (they had better access to raw materials), and significantly better benefits
including access to more food. After February 1943, they also offered protection from the STO.
Working for firms under contract to the Organisation Todt [OT] building German defenses was often
remunerative, especially in 1940-41, but the workers forced to live in OT camps were subject to ill
treatment regulated in accord with the Nazi racial hierarchy, and a large number of OT workers were
drawn from foreign forced labor, POWs, and concentration camp internees. At its maximum in the
spring of 1944, the OT in France employed more than 200,000 workers (Gaida, p. 243), perhaps as
many as 290,000 (Lemmes, pp. 219-20), of whom more than half came from other countries.
French firms cooperated in the vassalization of the French economy, but they generally did so under
duress. German controls on finance, raw materials, transport and markets and their oversight of Vichy
economic policies allowed little space for resistance before encountering German suppression, and many
firms chose to work with the Germans in order to be able to work at all. The contributors do not
address the issue of collaboration directly, but many do offer examples of resisting work for the German
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Volume 9 (2009)
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war effort. The Usine de ressorts du Nord produced springs for German railways (Laloux); workers for
the Marine française in Brest worked at harbor repair after the Armistice and then on repairing German
warships, but they worked as slowly as possible (Hellwinckel). Schneider, working directly for the
Germans, found many ways to reduce output: concealing raw materials, filling order books with French
orders, slowing production through elaborate schemes to order parts from distant firms, and allowing
workers to slow their pace, have high rate of absenteeism and facilitate sabotage. Not surprisingly, the
director of the Creusot factories, H.-C. Stroh, and many managers and workers suspected of sabotage
were arrested and deported in 1944 (Capuano). Strikes and sabotage slowed production. Neither form of
resistance receives much attention here; neither was recorded well in company archives. As the editors
point out, resistance activity had little impact on output, but after all its primary purpose was political.
In terms of work experience, aside from the convulsions of employment and labor conscription, falling
real wages and declining productivity, already well-known, these essays offer further information on
changes in the workplace to accommodate increased women’s employment and the impact of food
shortages. The latter took a toll in the form of absenteeism, illness, depleted worker strength and the
need to compete for scarce labor. The Vichy government encouraged the creation of comités sociaux to
supplement its Charte de Travail in October 1941, with these comités taking a notable role in dealing with
food supply problems. Employers adopted various strategies to retain workers and maintain output:
workers’ canteens, subsidizing workers’ gardens, supporting workers’ cooperatives for food acquisition.
Fabrice Grenard focuses specifically on “La question du ravitaillement,” which also takes a central role
in Michèle Blondé’s account of the comité social de la Société nationale de la viscose, and figures repeatedly
in essays on other firms. As Grenard points out, ravitaillement efforts at the level of individual firms
increased inequities within the working classes and increased animosity on the part of those excluded
from workplace benefits.
Two essays focus on women’s employment; Marie-Claude Albert on women in armaments factories in
Vienne, and Fabrice Virgili on French women in Germany. Albert examines the changes in women’s
employment in an arms factory in Châtellerault, the moral terms in which the management worried
about women’s behavior, and the changes in policy under German administration, ignoring French
“humanitarian” concerns in order to increase production. Virgili provides an overview of women’s part
in voluntary French labor in Germany (Pétain refused to extend the STO to include women in 1943).
Women were only a small part of the French labor force in Germany; somewhere between 50,000 and
70,000 of 1,500,000 French workers during the war. They volunteered in seeking employment
opportunities and to escape various problems in France; they were unimpressed by the low pay, working
conditions, long hours, barracks life, and shortages of food and clothing they found in Germany. So
many tried to find any way they could to return home that French authorities altered policy, ending
pregnancy as a valid reason for returning to France. When they did return, women were treated as
collaborators and subject to greater violence than returning men. The state also worried more about
women in its concern for contagion of venereal disease and TB.
As one would expect in a collection of conference papers, quality is not consistent, but it is generally
high in this collection. There are repetitions in analysis and the basic history of the period. Many of the
tables are poorly reproduced, and there is a scattering of mid-line hyphens throughout the text that
seems to be the product of an imperfect transition between word processing programs. The
contributions on non-French topics, covering social relations in the Belgian national railways and Czech
unions, are tacked on the last section with no effort to integrate them into the collection. The volume
has no index, a regrettable omission in a volume of this size with strong common themes. But the book
demonstrates the vitality of new research in labor history during the Occupation and its importance in
understanding the social impact, the inefficiencies, and the inequities of the German occupation. The
fact that so much new work is available in conference volumes, and that so little of it has been taken up
in surveys of the Vichy years, offers a great opportunity for a synthesis covering French work
experience during the Occupation.
H-France Review
Volume 9 (2009)
Page 205
LIST OF ESSAYS
Jean-Claude Daumas, “Introduction”
Jean-Pierre Harbulot, “Les travailleurs lorrians face aux contraintes en matière de main-d’oeuvre (19401944)
Jean-Claude Daumas, “Prélèvements de main-d’oeuvre et segmentation du marché du travail sous
l’Occupation. Le cas de la région Bourgogne / Franche-Comté (1942-1944)”
Isabelle Raynaud, “Lutte contre le chômage et politiques de l’emploi en Seine-Inférieure de 1940 à 1944”
Françoise Berger, “La société Schneider face au travail obligatoire en Allemagne”
Raphaël Spina, “Impacts du STO sur le travail en entreprises : activité productive et vie sociale interne
entre crises, bouleversements et adaptations (1942-1944)”
Pierre Judet, “Le travail et le retournement des valeurs sous l’Occupation. L’exemple d’un système
productif localisé : la vallé de l’Arve (Haute-Savoie)”
Laurence Bour, “La réquisition des cheminots pour le travail en Allemagne. L’apport des archives de la
SNCF”
Georges Ribeill, “Entre effectifs réduits et besoins accrus, quelques aspects de la gestion du personnel à
la SNCF (1939-1945)”
Marie-Noëlle Polino, “La réquisition des cheminots pour le travail en Allemagne. Une étude de cas”
Jean-Louis Loubet, “Le travail dans quelqeus entreprises automobiles françaises sous l’Occupation”
Christophe Capuano, “Travailler chez Schneider sous l’Occupation. Le cas des usines du Creusot”
Ludovic Laloux, “L’Usine de ressorts du Nord sous l’Occupation : les contraintes du travail pour
l’Allemagne”
Fabian Lemmes, “Les conditions de travail dans les entreprises françaises du bâtiment et des travaux
publics enrôlées dans l’Organisation Todt”
Peter Gaida, “Les camps de travail de l’Organisation Todt en France 1940-1944”
Lars Hellwinckel, “Les arsenaux de la Marine française sous l’Occupation : l’exemple du port de Brest
(1940-1944)”
Marie-Claude Albert, “Les femmes et le travail dans les usines d’armement de l’Ouest occupé : le cas de
la manufacture d’armes de Châtellerault”
Pierre Martin, “Le travail dans les services de l’Occupation : l’exemple de trois entreprises d’assurances”
Patrice Arnaud, “Rémunérer le travail forcé : réalités salariales et enjeux mémoriels”
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Volume 9 (2009)
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Sébastien Durand, “Politiques de rémunération dans les entreprises de la Gironde occupée. contraintes
allemandes et stratégies patronales”
Fabrice Virgili, “Les travailleuses françaises en Allemagne”
Mark Spoerer, “La dureté des conditions de vie et de travail des Français en Allemagne pendant les deux
guerres mondiales : une comparaison des taux de mortalité”
Fabrice Grenard, “La question du ravitaillement dans les entreprises françaises sous l’Occupation :
insuffisances et parades”
Patrick Mortal, “La vie ouvrière et syndicale dans les Manufactures nationales d’armes du centre de la
France à l’époque des «Usines mécaniques de l’Etat » : Tulle, Saint-Etienne, Châtellerault”
Michèle Blondé, “Le comité social de la Société nationale de la viscose à Grenoble, aspects politiques et
syndicaux”
Steven Zdatny, “Le travail dans les salons de coiffure sous l’Occupation”
Rémi Dalisson, “Représenter le travail sous Vichy : Mise en scène de l’entreprise et persistance d’une
subversion ouvrière en France, 1940-1944”
Paul Van Heesvelde, “« Vous considérant, M. le directeur général, comme le père de la grande famille du
rail » -- les relations sociales à la Société nationale des chemins de fer belges (SNCB) pendant la
Deuxième Guerre mondiale”
Jaromír Balcar and Jaroslav Kučera, “Les syndicats tchèques sous l’Occupation allemande (1939-1945).
Entre intérêts nationaux et sociaux”
Christian Chevandier, Denis Peschanski and Jean-Louis Robert, “Travailler sur le travail dans les
entreprises en France sous l’Occupation”
NOTES
[1] One notable recent exception is Richard Vinen, The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). The link between the STO and joining the Resistance was not
direct; most men evading STO went into hiding. See H. Roderick Kedward, “STO et maquis,” in La
France des années noires vol. 2, De l’Occupation à la Libération dir. by Jean-Pierre Azéma and François
Bédarida (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993 and 2000), 309-32.
[2] Jean-Pierre Le Crom, Syndicats, nous voilà! Vichy et le corporatisme (Paris: Les Éditions de l’atelier,
1995).
[3] See the special issues of Le mouvement social no. 158 (1992), and La Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième
Guerre mondiale no. 57 (1965).
[4] Denis Peschanski and Jean-Louis Robert, eds., Les ouvriers en France pendant la Seconde Guerre
mondiale (Paris: CNRS, 1992) and Bernard Garnier and Jean Quellien, eds., La main-d’oeuvre française
exploitée par le IIIe Reich (Caen: Centre de Recherche d’Histoire Quantiative, 2003).
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[5] Michel Margairaz and DanielleTartakowsky, eds., Le syndicalisme dans la France occupée (Rennes:
Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008).
[6] See the group’s internet site at: http://gdr2539.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr
[7] In this context, Philippe Burrin’s preference for “accommodation” rather than “collaboration” is
helpful; see Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, trans. by Janet
Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 1996).
Kenneth Mouré
University of California, Santa Barbara
[email protected]
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